How to Make Sense of the World
I’ve said elsewhere that human beings are a vexing lot. Or something to that effect. We all have different minds. We feel, believe, and think different things. Typically, we realize that, but we are all each of us arrogant. Even people who deny that they are arrogant are arrogant in the sense that, as an unavoidable consequence of human nature, they are bound to decide things for themselves and to act on those choices.
Every human being’s mind is self-contained. We cannot link our minds together in order to directly exchange feelings, attitudes, ideas, or instructions. Everything is mediated. Specifically, no one can mentally control another person. The illusion of control is possible, in fact it is common. No one can decide what is right or wrong for another person and enforce that decision. One person can plead, cajole, threaten, or actually hurt another person to apply influence, but short of drugs and mind-altering torture, people are always free to make up their own minds.
This is not to say that people do not regularly defer to others. But to call this giving up freedom is a fallacy. The freedom of the mind is not only difficult to take, it is difficult to give up.
Unfortunately, the belief that it is possible for one person to control another person is very prevalent. It is prevalent because it is attractive to both those who wish to have control, and those who wish to relinquish it. The former have no thought for consequences, so the responsibility of controlling another’s life is irrelevant to them. The latter are so afraid of the consequences of their own decisions that it’s as though they need the fantasy of domination to feel freedom from their responsibility, which is to say, freedom from guilt. Thus, they are co-dependent.
Dominance-submission co-dependency is the result of the human delusion that we can escape responsibility for our own actions. I am not willing to make a flat statement that this is a universally bad thing. It may be necessary to the formation of societies with minimal energy expenditure. It ensure social cohesion by allowing the formation of power structures, particularly hierarchies, wherein decisions, the actions taken as a result of them, and responsibility for them are delegated according to the import of the decisions. If every person had to consider whether to follow every order they received from a supervisor or leader, social institutions could not function quickly enough to accomplish anything. But if every individual felt the burden of full responsibility for their own actions, even when following directions, they would have to consider every direction and action in detail.
Still, I think that this philosophy of deferral is taken too far, particularly in personal relationships. Even then I am probably being idealistic, ignoring the reality that all relationships involve decision making and that power to make those decisions is rarely evenly distributed. However, my personality is such that I am keenly conscious of my own responsibility for my own decisions and the consequences of them, good or bad. Thus, I cannot assume a leadership position over submissive personalities, nor can I act as a submissive personality, without significant stress. I am one of those people who slow the process down.
Personally, I wish that more people were willing to acknowledge their own responsibility for their own decisions, for what they do and for what they believe. This is the kind of task which I could see myself trying to tackle, although I’m pessimistic. Society itself would have to somehow achieve a level of consciousness high enough to admit the negative fact of human responsibility avoidance patterns. Unfortunately, the exact opposite situation exists: society approves of responsibility avoidance. Religion and superstition are the most common examples. It is insidious, because people are not generally willing to acknowledge the critical fact that belief is a choice. They seem to assume that belief is something that happens and is out of their control. I am opposed to this attitude, obviously.
So, I have come to the conclusion that I do not so much want to change peoples’ incidental beliefs, but to change what they believe about belief itself. Granted, there seems to be a paradox or an infinite regression of causation, but everything comes back to feelings, which themselves are a result of physical states of mind, brain, body and environment. I choose to believe in the existence of a True reality, a physical world of consistent rules and natural laws, which is an absolute context within which human existence is set. No matter how imperfect our understanding of physical reality, no matter how confused we are by subjective interpretations, that world exists, and the human mind can work to attain a better understanding. This belief is fundamental to my entire value system.